US support for the war in Iraq collapsing

[TheVoice]

i disagree brother. i had a grown man kiss my feet in tears after he came out of the voting office. in fact the locals were told by insurgents that if they did vote they would be killed brutaly. by the way, this message was transmitted over the mosque loud speaker! go figure.

 

[Mikie]

you hit the bullet right on the primer man

 

[orlythen]

Are you like Dog the Bounty Hunter Kodiak, or are you an actual 'snake eater'?

 

[BabyE]

no, i dont make as much $ as dog, but i do the same job and i have eaten a snake during training. it does taste like chicken. so does gator

 

[asrobs]

did you know the first thing the us secured in iraq was the oil ministry. sounds cinda shady.... why do you guys think we are there and is it legitamate?

 

[DeathMasked]

America is in Iraq because it needs an enemy to deflect from the fact that you have a retard running the country.

I don't believe the 9/11 conspiracy theorists but I do think that Osama Bin Laden counted on such a predictable heavy-handed response from the US government. Before this, America was only hated by a minority of Muslims - now even the non extremists have good cause to dislike them. Way to unite everyone in the Arab world!!!! Afghanistan was the goal - Iraq was a bonus.


As for getting out of Iraq ..... well seeing as they made the mess in the first place they should bloody well clean it up.

 

[cmpunk]

I believe this is a very good question which cannot be answered easily. I think there were lots of reasons why we went there. There was one school of thought that said we went there to reshape the Middle East. This meant to convince the regimes in the region to crack down on Al Qaida. There was a very articulate exponant of this view who was posting here for a while. Of course, the US is now pushing democracy in the region to reshape it. This hopefully will turn out to be a good thing. There have been some pay offs. The Libyans saw what happened in Iraq and decided to turn over their WMD Program (that they actually had). They also decided to crack down on Islamic extremists and rejoin the world community. You have to count Libya as a success. It's too early to tell if it will be a regional success as a whole or it will end up being a colossal failure in the end. I bring up this reason because you don't normally hear it discussed.

I can accept the above school of thought as a better reason than Saddam had WMD or some imagined al Qaida-Iraq connection. However, they didn't tell us this was the real reason, did they? After hearing learned people discuss this particular line of thinking I often wonder if this what the Bush White House actually thought, and got buy in from Blair & Howard. Or was it "I'm a going in to finish what my Daddy started and to help all my supporters back in Texas to get oil rights...Yee ha!". The bottom line on whatever good & bad that we do there, is they still lied to us about why we went.

 

[banjaran]

On the topic of them securing oilfields firsts, to be fair in the first gulf war Saddam did sabotage the oil fields and was obviously going to do it again, so if they weren't going in for oil alone they would hardly just ignore the oilfields just to prove a point.

 

[Momofalively2t]

JKD is right, one of the reasons we secured the oil fields was simply because we didnt want them to go up in flames again. as far as WMD? no we didnt find any, but we DID find caches of chemical and biological weapons, weapons that cause far more painful and prolonged deaths (just not as many, usually) as a nuke. Everyone focuses on "we're there for the oil and for the nukes" no, we arent. Do a quick research project (yes im giving you homework) on the idigenous kurds of northern iraq, they wanted to secede so hussein used them as a test field for aforementioned biochemical weapons. get out of iraq? yeah i think we should, we have no right to tell other what governmental system to use, we got rid of hussein, we secured his weapons, let them have their lives back.

in closing:

yes i think we shoul dhave (and did) go there, and for the right reasons, to protect those who cannot protect themselves.

NO i dont think we should be there, projecting our puppet governements and whatnot, democracy is about letting people decide, maybe we ought to not be hypocrites and let them decide whether or not to be a democracy?

to the person complaining about "our boys" getting killed: face the fact, it IS an all volunteer army, if they complain about this or that, that they did or didnt get, too bad, if they can't take the time to read the contract for their next 2-8 years, they deserve it for their own ignorance. I joined and am quite happy, I took the time to make sure I got what I wanted, and I wouldn't have done anything differently.

79th MP Company
US Army Reserve


--edit-- on a sidenote, another reason we helped get the oil stuff taken care of as one of the first things was because we have some lucrative deals with them for a few years, to HELP FINANCE THE WAR, I think americans would whine far more if it was taken out of their taxes.

 

[MrRedman]

dont need to research the kurds, i lived with them for a while in kirkuk

none of the chemical weapons caches that ive seen during my stay in kirkuk, baghdad or balad were able to be launched or used, and eod said they were most likely from earlier pre gulf war days. that doesnt sound like evidence of wmds to me. but im no expert

 

[psycomathesaurus]

intelligence has been wrong, and i agree we didnt find any nukes, i consider any sort of biological weaposn a far more frightening proposition (I even dislike that -we- have stockpiles of it) it just irritates me that people latch onto one specific reason such as "we went tehre for the nukes" or "the oil" etc, we went there for a variety of reasons, and regardless of why we are there, even if it -somehow- was for completely selfish reasons, every single soldier in the united states armed forces volunteered and agreed to follow the core values, and if i die to save a foreign family's life, so be it (granted I'd be a bit miffed about being dead and all, but nonetheless)

frankly It bothers me when people think that soldiers are brainless lugs who got tricked into joining/deploying, and people who blame soldiers for their problems, just the other day my car got egged (I proudly display an army sticker on my rear windshield). We live in this country and ought to respect those that keep it from no longer being our country, hate the bush administration all you want (I do) but support your troops regardless.

remember:
If you can read this, thank a teacher. If you can read this in your native language, thank a soldier.

 

[andreio]

sorry to rain on your parade hobbitlauncher but NO chemical weapons stockpiles were found in iraq of any kind.

there were a very few old shells found with *trace* amounts of chemical weapons dated to before the first gulf war.

this is pretty commonly known news.. i am surprised you still have the idea that chemicals were found.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3386357.stm

here is a more detailed story one about the american led investigation.

http://www.apfn.net/messageboard/04-27-05/discussion.cgi.28.html

 

[SWACKFORTHECRAIC]

mustard gas laced mortar rounds do qualify as chemical weapons IIRC.

from the message board post:


from the bbc post:


^-- the BBC reports says the weapons showed traces of blister agents, meaning on the outside, the scientists then went through the cache and properly disposed of the agents still contained within. many were leaking, yes, but that doesn't immediately mean they are empty

so he dismantled any facilities that could have been producing them at that very moment, the Allies are not the only side with intelligence sources. That stockpile proves he DID have chemical weapons that were still virulent. was he producing them? no. Did he HAVE them, yes, and probably sold or destroyed others. I don't doubt we will find more stockpiles (it could be many years in the future when a farmer digs one up on accident or some such even)

so now we have established he did have them, now we wonder why he didn't use them, right? simple, he didn't use them because he assumed we wouldn't find him, and he could come out of hiding later on and say "hey look everyone, the allied invasionw as led by a bunch of moronic idiots, i'm not a cruel arse with chemical weapons" etc.

even still this ought to be reason enough for us to have gone in, (as i said i dont think we should still be there rpessing democratic agendas):

 

[FantasyKnight]

it really dosen't get much clearer than this from the second link..

"Washington - In his final word, the CIA's top weapons inspector in Iraq said Monday that the hunt for weapons of mass destruction has "gone as far as feasible" and has found nothing, closing an investigation into the purported programs of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2003 invasion.

"After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted," wrote Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group, in an addendum to the final report he issued last fall.

"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible."

and from the first link..

"However, US officials played down the find, saying the shells were probably left over from Saddam Hussein's 1980-88 war with Iran.

The coalition has yet to uncover proof that Iraq was still developing weapons at the time of the war last spring.

The 36 120mm shells appear to have been buried for at least 10 years, the Danes said."

those shells were buried for more than 8 years BEFORE the invasion and were harmless. even a study by YOUR OWN gov't has said there were no weapons found.

 

[lanek]

hobbitlauncher - you're stressing about 10yo bullet casings?!

The US, Russia and Britain sold the chemical/biological weapons to Saddam and then sat back as he used them. The Bush administration only dredged that old material up years after the fact, to use it as a justification for a war they had already planned.

Why do you think the Security Council members seized and censored the weapons report that Saddam Hussein produced before the war:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2002-12-11-us-iraq-report_x.htm

simply because Saddam disclosed how he actually received the weapons, which would tar the US/Britain/France/Russia with the same "war crime" brush as the US now use as a justification to invade. Just like how a POW is a POW, with the associated rights under international law, unless he's been captured by an American.


How about the US actively using napalm and depleted uranium on Iraqis?!

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=6529

Don't get all self-righteous - isn't it ironic that the Bush admin now say they invaded because Saddam used chemical weapons once in the past (although he no longer had the weapons), and they are now using WMD's (napalm, radiation, agent orange, etc) on combatants and civilians in Iraq!!

 

[heremeow]

im not trying to be self-righteous at all, and I do think many of the reasons were just a shove to further bush's agendas, etc, but to say that is the only reason is ludicrous. I frankly dont give a rats arse about the WMD's/biochemical weapons/etc. I care that other people seem to think and focus on one sole reason to the exclusion of all others, you guys are presenting good facts, and so I don't mind the fact you think bush is a moronic fool (and I agree) but the "support poll" I guarantee is filled with people who know little/nothing but hearsay, and simply parrot it back. I don't make coofftopicnd decisions, and I don't want to. but as i said before, the fac tthat that regime took 5000 lives, knowingly and willfully, is enough reason to have smashed it into bits. and i also stated we SHOULDNT be there any longer.

i do agree with the hypocritical part of it, the fact that we traded our nuclear secrets to britain and france in order to get VX nerve gas from them, and the fact that we now sell the same weapons we become publicly outraged over to the people who are outraged by, it is ridiculous, im not trying to stand up for the administation at all, im standing up for the soldiers, who are there 9at least in the beginning) to help protect those who cannot protect themselves. I'm not asking anyone to support the war, I'm asking people to remember soldiers are people to, with loved ones back home, who dedicated their lives to protecting the average joe so he can continue living his unassuming life. Maybe we ought to be in iraq, maybe not, either way we are already there, get over it, and support the other -human beings-, hell, I think we should have gone in and removed saddam YEARS ago, not to mention never decided to play god and put our puppet in power in the first place.

those were some good links though, thanks for the reads.

 

[icretedthiscozihad2]

WMDs were THE reason that the UK supported the invasion of Iraq. As this was found to be flawed they were there under faulty mandate

 

[BubbaB]

be that as it may, I'm on this side of the pond, that's between you guys and Blair, and between Blair and Bush (meaning, at least on that last link, nothings going to happen *sigh*)